Title

Author(s)

Abstract

We use a phenomenological field theory, reflecting the symmetries and conservation laws of sandpiles, to compare the driven dissipative sandpile, widely studied in the context of self-organized criticality, with the corresponding fixed-energy model. The latter displays an absorbing-state phase transition with upper critical dimension d(c) = 4. We show that the driven model exhibits a fundamentally different approach to the critical point, and compute a subset of critical exponents. We present numerical simulations in support of our theoretical predictions.

Notes

Originally published in Physical Review Letters, v.81 no.25 (1998), pp.5676-5679. DOI:10.1103/PhysRevLett.81.5676. Dr. Vespignani is affiliated with Northeastern University as of the time of deposit.